Early Demo Released on itch.io for Windows only:
https://boldaestheticcreative.itch.io/plasma-pursuit

It is 2092. Humanity is on the verge of extinction and the Grid of AI is stronger than ever! In the recreated world of the much-advanced AI, it has gained emotions and forces the remaining humankind to fight against each other and with other cyber-vehicles in the blood-filled Arena.

The player plays the role of Derek, the main character who has been surviving all the Arena battles for more than 13 years. Due to his fast and sick battle style, he got the nickname of D-Sick. Along with him, is a tech-oriented assistant and a fascinating hacker called Tyler who gives Derek instructions during the entire time via the radio.

The player is to lead Derek to battle against the deadly cyber-vehicles that roam the highways and take down one machine after another to clear the roads of this ruthless threat.

Exciting Neon Flow Art Style – Explore the world created by AI and discover the beautiful artistic patterns embedded by the machines.

Joyful Drifting and Dashes – Enjoy the lovely car controller crafted just to give an exciting experience with the handbrakes, boosts and dashes.

Fast-Paced Adrenaline Driven Car Battles – Battle against the Cyber Vehicles and Turrets, all at a fast pace and juicy feel to survive and thrive with your Cybo-09.

Character-driven Story Line – Follow Derek and Tyler into the battles, guide him and survive as he discovers the ugly truths about AI… and humanity.

Capture the moments in style – Take Screenshots of different styles using the built-in Photo Mode in the pause menu.

This is an early demo. Therefore, expect bugs! With that said, I hope you will enjoy it, please share your thoughts and give us feedback. Thank you!

Early Demo Released on itch.io for Windows only:
https://boldaestheticcreative.itch.io/plasma-pursuit

The post Plasma Pursuit with Silver Demon Studios appeared first on Bold Aesthetic Creative Games.

There were a total of 6 Participants namely me (Bilal), Rayyan Aziz, Sufian Ahmed, M. Touseef, Zahid Ali and Saif Ali Khan. We all developed 3 Games together in this short weekend of 48 fun-filled hours consisting of a keynote, theme reveal, a ride to a mall for getting fresh burgers, an amazing chess battle with all the nostalgic game talks, a photo session, a pizza party, 2 nighters (!) and game presentations!

Here are some of the photos of the Global Game Jam 2023 at BAC Games!

Play the games that our participants developed at the Global Game Jam 2023 (BAC Games) here:

https://globalgamejam.org/2023/jam-sites/bold-aesthetic-creative-games

Thank you for your support and as always, Happy GameDev!

The post BAC Games hosting Global Game Jam 2023 appeared first on Bold Aesthetic Creative Games.

Twisted Metal inspired Car Combat game along with stylish aspects of NFS Unbound and a few other games.

What’s up and coming?

Plasma Pursuit is the demo coming out of Project Twisted Unbound. It is gonna be a small game available on boldaestheticcreative.itch.io for you to try out. We hope that you will like it and will follow us for the sake of the bigger release on Steam.

The game is set in a future where AI dominates the world and controls the remaining population of humans, basically using them as toys. In the Future, they hold a yearly competition of Car Derby where the drivers are Humans and they are forced to fight against each other. This year it’s happening again and your AI is also participating which means you get to fight in this car combat tournament. Good Luck!

The post Project Twisted Unbound – A Collaboration between BAC Games and Silver Demon Studios appeared first on Bold Aesthetic Creative Games.

What is that first game that pops up in your mind when I say… Turn Based Strategy

Advance Wars? No!

Well, I don’t know about you. But to me, it is and will always be… Chess.

Such an intuitive game with so simple rules and a small grid to play on, ideal for a board game.

With just a particular move set for each piece type and the King being the most vital piece, the game immerses the players into such an amazing…

Unknown Guy: ‘HEY Cheema.’
Yeah, what is it?
Unknown Guy: ‘You know that this is PAB Devlog, and not Ches-‘
Oh yeah yeah, I was just getting to that. Thanks though.

Speaking of move set, in Chess, you pick a piece and move it. And that’s exactly what I implemented next in my game.

And by the way, if you are new to this channel, I am developing a turn based strategy game inspired by Advance Wars and I am calling it Project Advance Breach or PAB if you… like acronyms.

Before going for unit selection, I first created a cool indicator for unit selection that snaps to the grid positions. I think it is pretty satisfactory to look at especially how that upper part rotates and floats like a typical pickup in many games that I have played.

So yeah, after that I did the unit selection thingy and after selecting the unit, you move it. Obviously this requires doing pathfinding stuff ahh which honestly… I have never really done it as such.

The best solution: A* most likely. I thought of doing jump point search which is more performant than your typical A* in most scenarios BUT the tiles or terrain in my game will probably have different movement costs and JPS doesn’t account for that.

So, I started looking at many tutorials for A* on YouTube and one of the things missing in many of them is, the concept itself. Like… I am one of those guys who visualize things step by step before really getting into programming a feature or algorithm… whatever it is.

So, most of the videos aren’t really helping me EXCEPT for one… the first video of Sebastian Lague’s A* pathfinding series. Step by step demonstration, clear visualization and even pseudocode at the end. It made things crystal clear as to what A* algo really looks like.

After that, I created a A* path between unit and the target tile to which the unit will move and the rest was quite straight forward really.

Ehhhhh… this entire thing took me like… a day to implement! which honestly seems like a really basic thing. But hey, I don’t wanna DISCOURAGE ANY OF YOU guys, okay!

Even though I like Chess, I don’t want the playing field to be limited to just 64 tiles. And so, I make bigger maps AAANNND bigger maps requires a Camera that can MOVE!

Lerp here, lerp there, lerp above, lerp below, zoom zig zag zooooo. Done!

Making this cam controller is probably one of the most fun parts of this project till now…

EXCEPT for the rotations. This gimbal lock thingy and quaternion shenanigaaans really annoyed me.

But at the end, I found this: Quaternion.AngleAxis (https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Quaternion.AngleAxis.html) which fixed all my issues in one big shot. This allowed me to implement the 90 degree cam rotation just like in XCOM even though I didn’t like the game as such.

And after that, guess what… just like any other slacking gamedev… I got distracted.

I ended up joining a little jam with a bunch of my gamedev friends and made this cool little turn based card game.

It is not strategy as such but that doesn’t mean you can play mindlessly. If you do, you will probably lose. I think you will like it if you are into card games. So definitely try out the game, Bitsy Turn Stack.

https://img.itch.zone/aW1nLzEwMTg4OTQ0LnBuZw==/original/eQd0AT.png

Play Bitsy Turn Stack on Web: https://boldaestheticcreative.itch.io/bitsy-turn-stack

Let me know your thoughts in the comments. Also, let me know if I should go a little deeper into technical stuff. And that’s it. I hope that you liked it. Good bye!

The post Making a new Turn Based Strategy Game – PAB Devlog #2 appeared first on Bold Aesthetic Creative Games.

I have played Advance Wars, Advance Wars Black Hole Rising, Advance Wars Duel Strike, and Advance Wars Days of Ruin, you guessed it, I love this series.

I am a big fan of bright light-hearted strategy games with quirky characters and beefy soundtracks. Well, Days of Ruin is a bit different but that’s another story.

And then, it kinda… died?

I mean there were no more Advance Wars games and Nintendo kinda went along with Fire Emblem which ain’t bad but I kinda missed those games.

Up until now, I have gotten into so many other games but I only recently, got this game called Into The Breach for free on the Epic store. And let me just tell you, it is… freaking good! You should play that.

I have ended it like three times already and still get an itch for it.

It reminded me of Advance Wars… again… after such… a long time. And surprisingly enough, Nintendo is coming up with a new Advance Wars game. A remaster of Advance Wars 1 and 2 called Reboot Camp. It is really cool and I love the new look but I don’t like the fact that it is JUST a remaster.

And there you go ladies and gentlemen… that’s where I realized that I gotta do it! Indie me has been developing games as a hobby for a couple of years. And finally, I wanna step up and develop my first true professional commercial game inspired by Advance Wars.

The game engine of choice is Unity. And yeah, big fan of this default look. Always gets on my nerve every time I see this default skybox.

Obviously, I don’t want to make the SAME advance wars. I sort of want a blend of this and that. Instead of going isometric pixel art like with Into The Breach, I am going for a stylized 3D isometric perspective. *cough* not even sure whether that’s a thing or not.

The first thing that came to my mind is to make my own custom grid editor to place the tiles in the 3D world. And so, I did…

After that, I made some pretty basic tiles in Blender. Basically, I bevelled the corners and it looks pretty decent.

After that, I tried to implement a few shiny things like fog tile, water shader and wind particles.

I searched on youtube and got to this video from which I end up making this fog tile. It looks cool but I am not sure how to use it as of now so, I am just gonna keep it for use later on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qE3tAfijuk

And for water shader, I found yet another video on youtube. Got the unity package, modified the shader graph a bit and voila… a stylized water plane is ready! I can’t believe how easy it is to develop games. Huh, pish of cake!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_HUntydy8I

For wind particles, I used a trail renderer and played around with velocity curves.

And here’s the end result!

I hope that you liked it. Let me know in the comments what you think about it and what else should I implement. Will come up with another devlog next month. Goodbye!

The post Making a new Turn Based Strategy Game – PAB Devlog #1 appeared first on Bold Aesthetic Creative Games.

Controls:
Movement: WASD
Shooting: Left Click – Single Shot,
Right Click – Burst
Jump: Space Key
Slow Motion: Shift/F
Pause: Escape/Tab/P

Game Duration:
10 to 15 minutes.

Difficulty:
Very Hard

The game is developed in association with the HomeTeam GameDev community and I was the team lead.

Play on your browser!

The game took only 10 weeks to develop and has this polished feel to it! I have even added a leaderboard to the game. If you are interested in how the game was developed, you can start with this video:

Anyways, if you have reached the bottom of this post and wondering where’s the link to try the game out… (Thanks!)

IT IS HERE! Play on your browser!

Check out my previous HomeTeam Lead Entries:

1. Nick Of Time
2. Mystic Chambers
3. Flick Tactics
4. Hover Tactics

The post Rude Machines with HomeTeam GameDev appeared first on Bold Aesthetic Creative Games.

Yeah, you will see this a lot since I keep taking part in jams one after the other.

This time, it’s GGJ 2022 with a really cool theme, Duality. And this time, another indie gamedev participated with me, Mutee.

In this game jam, I came up with an idea where there’s this duality mechanic… cards will have positive consequences in a turn and negative consequences in the alternative turns. The turn is defined by the card placed on the plane BUT it’s all real-time!

Play Dino Flippers on Windows

This idea really caught the attention of everyone including those who were supporting us during the GGJ 2022. And so, I started prototyping it in the Unity Game Engine.

Blended with Mutee’s dinosaurs’ fantasy, here’s what I came up with…

The game is hundred and ten percent inspired by Nethercard Kingdom led by Kornel at the HomeTeam GameDev community. In that game, I really made the card handling feel smooth and awesome. And so, I sorta replicated that feeling in this game as well. Along with that, I added an invert shader which inverts the screen indicating the card’s good and bad turns!

While I was doing all that, Mutee shared the artwork for the first few units. He meant to iterate on it but regardless of that, I added them to the game which started to add some context to our game, Dino Flippers!!!

Mutee improved the art and I further improved the mechanic. Now, cards can be added and/or discarded. There are also the mana points limiting the card usage rate in order to add some difficulty.

And after all the hiccups and challenges, here’s what the game finally looks like.

I do want to mention that I couldn’t bring the good/bad or duality factor in the card play as much as I like to and that, the mechanics could have been a lot better. With that said, 2 to 3 plays would be fun for anyone! It is short and who doesn’t like playing with dinosaurs

All the artwork and audio are contributed by Mutee. Thank you!

So what exactly is Dino Flippers: It is a Card-Based Single Screen Strategy where you have to face the ‘duality’ of effects with the cards every other turn.

Dino Flippers on the Global Game Jam site

Play Dino Flippers on Windows

The post Developing Dino Flippers for Global Game Jam 2022 appeared first on Bold Aesthetic Creative Games.

This one covers the first jam. This time, all the participants were restricted to developing HCG or Hyper Casual Game only and the theme was FOOD!

We formed a team and named it Team Code Blooded comprising of M. Memon, Hassan, Ali Hamza, Sohaib and me of course. The first phase was brainstorming and the ideation phase where we looked at multiple HCG games related to food. Then, we gathered the ideas over at Miro and tried to make some sense out of them, blending some already existing ideas and creating our own.

We decided to go for a finite runner game where the player has to steal food from stalls while avoiding being captured. Some sort of robin hood theme is what we were looking for.

Play StallSTEAL on browser or mobile!

And so, I opened the asset store, brought free assets into the engine and started making the basic game. I used Spline Mesh for creating not just the player path but also the entire level (procgen!!!). I started out with the realistic look and Mixamo character + animations.

I made it in a way that the stalls are placed on an invisible tree-like pattern allowing for diverse path choices for the player. This also means that it is time to add player controls (or a way to select a choice/path).

Obviously, a lerping T-Pose Player is NOT looking good at all! So, I replaced it with proper animations, angle/direction and linear movement.

This realistic style wasn’t popping as much and it doesn’t have that ‘quick and fun game’ vibe. So, I tried a much warmer and low poly look. I asked others on Epiphany’s Discord server and majority liked this warmer art style. It seems to be much more engaging. And this also, made me changing the surrounding buildings.

Then, I added further props. Ali Hamza also helped me on that. Added the arrow for the sense of direction and removed the player pausing moment between choices to encourage a faster gameplay. All of a sudden, the game actually start to feel like a GAME!!!

Unfortunately, THAT is too fast for players to make right choices. So, I added slow mo effect when player is very close to a stall allowing for easier path selection without losing the fast gameplay feel. I also added the patrolling bots that chase the player upon detection. And obviously, a lot more tiny behind-the-scene tweaks which would take me more than this post to explain haha!!!

There were a lot of game design decisions made as well. For instance, taking up the fruit speeds up the character temporarily. Or when the player has crossed the amount of fruit needed to win the level, it becomes hard all of a sudden to add more challenge to the remaining level (basically, a sorta rubber banding effect).

Here’s how our submitted game is. I hope that you will enjoy this little clip. There’s a special focus on sound effects as well, most of which are created with my own mouth haha.

The game ended up getting 2nd (first runners up) in the Developer’s Game Jam 2.0. That’s amazing considering the fact that I am not very much into HCG stuff and that, many of the participants were hoping for my game to get the first place. Thank you!

At first, it felt ambitious during the brainstorming session but overtime, we realized that it is all about breaking things down into tiny steps and then, focusing on each of the step rather than looking at the big picture. Brainstorming is for setting the big picture after which the execution part should simply be a step by step process without getting overwhelmed by that big picture IMO.

As for my perfect game, it is NOT perfect! There were a lot of bugs and issues that I haven’t talked much in here. But why don’t you play that game yourself and see it for yourself?

Play StallSTEAL on browser or mobile!

The post Developing StallSTEAL – Developer’s Game Jam 2.0 appeared first on Bold Aesthetic Creative Games.

Game Duration: 15 minutes to an hour.

The game is developed in association with the HomeTeam GameDev community and I was the team lead.

Play on your browser!

Why you should play Hover Tactics?

Hover Tactics is one of my most exciting, neat and polished game releases that are enjoyable and truly fun to play (if you can handle the difficulty, that is). I feel like, with this game, I have stepped up in the gamedev and can see this game as a ‘LEVEL UP!’

Honestly, I sidetracked this project in the initial stage but as I kept moving a little forward every week, it started to become exciting and immediately got my attention. This is where the HomeTeam community shines! The concept of doing little every week is a very POWERFUL one!

This game project, Hover Tactics took only 3 months of development time and if you want to go in-depth regarding the development of the game and how it takes this current form, you can check out this playlist where you can watch all the weekly update videos of this game:

Anyways, if you have reached the bottom of this post and wondering where’s the link to try the game out… (Thanks!)

IT IS HERE! Play on your browser!

Check out my previous HomeTeam Lead Entries:

1. Nick Of Time
2. Mystic Chambers
3. Flick Tactics

The post Hover Tactics with HomeTeam GameDev appeared first on Bold Aesthetic Creative Games.

So, with all that said, I tried to develop a basic zombie game on Unreal Engine 5. I developed a decent amount of it and then, packaged it for Windows. But when I tried to run it, it gave me an error. I tried a bunch of stuff but couldn’t come up with a solution.

In other words…

I switched…

…to Unreal Engine 4.27 for developing the game for the Epic MegaJam. *sigh*

Do keep in mind that Unreal Engine 5 is early access at the time of me writing this post. With all that said, here are some game screenshots within the UE5’s editor:

C++ and Blueprints

Unreal Engine has blueprint functionality which can be referred to as visual scripting or programming using nodes and graphs. At first, it does seem really odd and messy considering the fact that you always have to adjust the wires and nodes in a way that is comfortable to read and go through the logic and stuff.

Now, one might say, “Unreal got C++, why use Blueprints?”. Well, Unreal is more compatible with Blueprints than C++ and the engine favors Blueprints itself. It is made in a way that whoever is operating the engine should use Blueprints and only shift to C++ when faced with its limitations. At least that’s what I think about it.

Well, anyways. As I said, I ended up using Unreal Engine 4 and unfortunately, I couldn’t achieve the exact same results with it. With that said, I ended up using some post-processing plugins and tried to make very unique aesthetics for my game.

Now, let’s talk about the game, Fogombies.

As this mystifying fog covers the entire world, everyone is converting to zombies. Or more appropriately, FOGOMBIES. Now, you are the lone survivor who uses Fog Disseminators to survive from that damn fog.

Survive the Three Waves of Fogombies while protecting the Fog Disseminators!

Yup, that’s all. It has some bugs and glitches, and I did struggle with some of the logic using Unreal Engine. There are a lot of custom rulesets and Unreal ways of doing things which makes the learning curve a lot higher as compare to game engines like Unity and/or Godot.

Download My First Unreal Engine Game – Fogombies (Windows only)

The post My First Unreal Engine Game for Epic MegaJam appeared first on Bold Aesthetic Creative Games.